Arksofts "Crunchie" Release (v1.0)

[simbot82]

Somebody has a little money to burn don't they . I think the best I will ever do is picking up a few xbox 360's when they are cheap for extender purposes

[mrees]

Not at all my good friend simbot

I just have a VERY understanding girlfriend

And a few tax return dollars lying around

[arkay]

Hmmm. At the moment you can't have 2 installs of Crunchie. What I may be able to do is add another switch, something like "Crunch to profile 1, then to profile 2". Alternately just a single switch to switch to the alternate profile so you can crunch for that device, then switch it back and crunch for your main machine...

Will have to think about it. The framerate thing is interesting as modifying the framerate can cause sync issues with the audio. When I get time I'll give it a try. Might not be for a while though Lots going on at the moment.

Cheers,
Arkay.

[_MoebiuS_]

Yep, just changing those values is all that is required to adapt to the source res. Although, in technical terms you also need to know the exact source res after the crop is performed. You can find this out. If you run Crunchie from the command line like this:

crunchie.exe -d

If will spew out debugging information (to the log and screen), including the crop detection. You should see a line in the output something along the lines of:

"Final crop string is xx:yy:xx:yy"

Those values will tell you what your image was really cropped too. Using values for Ar16:9/AR4:3 any larger or smaller than the values returned will result in scaling of the image.

The ratio is quite simple determined by the size of the crop area. If x > than 640 it assumes 16:9, else 4:3. At some point I need to make this more accurate as it propably won't work for HD files etc.

Hi,

Maybe you can point out a rule from the "genre tag" in the dvr-ms files. For instance a profile for films in 16:9 and a 4:3 for old series ?


Here is my results on the first 7'28'' of Alien movie (the original dvr-ms file is 267 463 723 bytes for a resolution of 720x576 with upper and lower black bars and bitrate at 159622kbps) :
Here is a cap at 0:05:30:

the caps is 704x576 (whereas dvr-ms info in Media player says 720... dvr is a tricky guy...)


Default format, double pass, double deinterlace, bitrate 1000, auto-crop with default AR169
=> 640x368, 16:9, 63 611 434 bytes



Default format, double pass, double deinterlace, bitrate 1000, target resolution higher AR169
= > 704x368, 16:9, 63 606 238 bytes... nearly the same size. Rescaling means harder compression ? Seems OK when playing in WMplayer but the caps from Cyberlink PowerDVD shows something else (seems that pixels are not "square"). In Cyberlink I use for the aspect ratio "original video source size". So it seems that WMplayer does a correction when playing the files...



Force 4.3, double pass, double deint, bitrate 1000, auto-crop

no comment.

> What should I do ? Keep the original AR43 and AR169 ini definitions ?
WMPlayer seems to do the apropriate ratio correction when playing, but how to be sure that the file is universal and play well with other environments (MCE, Cyberlink Player, Kiss DP500 player...).


I have another sample. Here is a caps from a MPEG2 file (one extracted from Terratec application) and the original stream appears like that (it is 544x576)...


For this kind of stream, how cruncher will react ? Do I have to force the 4:3 ratio to extend the picture (even if it is cropped afterwards) ? Should you stick to original AR ini settings ?


I found a neat editor for dvr-ms (dcut) but not for plain vanilla Mpeg2. So, if I test crunchie on one of my mpeg2 movie, I have to do it on the whole movie and it takes hours so I prefer to ask you before

Do you have a web reference that treats that mad ratio stuff ?

Cheers.

[arkay]

Hi,

Haven't really got time to look into this right now as I'm going away for a few days.

Will check it out when I can though. In the mean time if you really want to get into aspect ration stuff etc get over to www.doom9.org. There's plenty there to learn about anything to do with video.

Cheers,
Arkay.

[yeeeeha]

thanks again for the swift reply.

i uninstalled v1 as instructed and installed 1.09b.

mixed results, arkay.
all settings were left in the default state except the folder locations and NTSC instead of PAL.
first test: crunchied a 1-hour hd (16:9) show ("lost").
the avi aspect ratio was correct, but it played at about 1/2 speed and the sound was garbled.
upon re-launching crunchie right after this test, a dos box appeared then disappeared too quickly to read its contents and the program would not launch. rebooting didn't help.
i had to uninstall and reinstall to proceed.

second test: crunchied a 5-min. segment of another hd show.
perfect results apart from being slightly less sharp.
i'm using a 70" sony xbr lcd.

third test: crunchied a 5-min. segment of a different show.
perfect results.

more feedback as i'm able, particularly on hour-long shows.

thank you for all your efforts.
cheers, jim

[mrees]

Arkay

Thanks for your response

Apologies that I didnt respond sooner, for some reason my notifications on some threads isnt working correctly

I appreciate your help on this
In the meantime I think Im going to do a little reading up on mencoder

Cheerz Arkay

[yeeeeha]

hi, Arkay

I'm sticking with 1.09b and today will test an hour-long cable broadcast instead of an over-the-air one, thinking that maybe crunchie requires a perfect stream - no dropped frames, pauses, etc.

my only purpose for using crunchie will be to archive certain over-the-air shows, but if it won't work for that, i must give it up till i hear more encouragement.

no apologies necessary for not responding immediately. i sympathize with the pressure of other commitments.

cheers, jim donaldson

[mrees]

Hmmm. At the moment you can't have 2 installs of Crunchie. What I may be able to do is add another switch, something like "Crunch to profile 1, then to profile 2". Alternately just a single switch to switch to the alternate profile so you can crunch for that device, then switch it back and crunch for your main machine....arkay

Arkay,
Just reading this and thinking about it a bit more, I havea few dual core machines, so there is no real need for crunchie to be installed twice, once would do, I will just put it on 2 different machines.

Is it possible though to configure the output stream to a different resolution and framerate?
If I could do that, I reakon I would be sorted !

Man, if bloody Procoder just supported Xvid I wouldnt even have to bother with any of this...

Any thoughts?
Thanks again for all the efforts. My new dual core server is LOVING Crunchie. Its pretty much going all day and night. Totally purrs man

[arkay]

Ok. As far as changing the output resolution you can do that now by modifying the AR4:3 or AR16:9 values. That'll fix that problem. The framerate thing requires investigation that I can't do at the moment.

Please remind me off it though as I'd like to make the tool as flexible as possible.

I'm going to close this thread now as v1.1 is released. Please use that thread for further queries and discussion. It's getting hard to keep track of everything specially since I've been away for a bit.

Cheers,
Arkay.